The estimation of the return on firms’ investments – as to ISO 9001

The aim of this paper was to estimate the return on investment in QMS (quality management systems) certification undertaken in Portuguese firms, according to the ISO 9000 series. A total of 426 certified Portuguese firms were surveyed. The response rate was 61.03 percent. The different payback periods were validated through statistical analysis and the relationship between expected and perceived payback periods was discussed. This study suggests that a firm’s sector of activity, size and degree of internationalization are related to the length of the investment in QMS certification recovery period. Furthermore, our findings suggest, that the time taken to obtain the certification is not directly related to the economic component of the certification. The majority of Portuguese firms (58.9%) took up to three years to recoup their investment and 35.5% of companies said they had not yet recovered the initial investment made. The recoup of investment was measured by the increase in the number of customers and consequent volume of deliveries, improved profitability and productivity of the company, improvement of competitive position and performance (cost savings), reduction in the number of external complaints and internal defects/scrap, achievement of some important clientele, among others. We compared our work to similar studies undertaken in other countries. This paper provides a contribution to the research related to the return on investment for costs related to the certification QMS according to ISO 9000. This paper provides a valuable contribution to the field and is one of the first studies to undertake this type of analysis in Portugal.

Success factors of regional airports: the case of Oporto airport

Oporto Airport (OPO) is a success story among European regional airports. This success is expressed, among other ways, in the rapid expansion of routes and the strong growth in demand, as well as in the recognition of the airport’s quality by its users. Over the past decade, the volume of traffic increased by almost 3.4 million passengers, from the 2.6 million recorded in 2002 to over 6 million in 2012. In this paper, we analyse some of the factors that influenced the success of Oporto Airport, namely the expansion of capacity and improvements to infrastructure, the increase in the number of routes and the increased demand in response to the new capacities of this airport-airlines set. Particular emphasis is given to the role of low cost carriers (LCC) in the growth of Oporto Airport and to strategies of attracting more traffic. Some of the main opportunities and challenges that this airport will face in the coming years are also discussed.

Antibodies against Bovine herpesvirus 1 in dairy herds in the state of Espirito Santo, Brasil

Bovine herpesvirus 1 (BoHV-1) causes major losses in worldwide livestock, affecting the respiratory and reproductive tracts of bovine. In the past decades, the number of cases in Brazil has been gradually increasing. Therefore, it is important to assess the distribution of infection in different regions of the country. In the state of Espírito Santo (ES) the BoHV 1 infection rate in dairy cattle herds is unknown. Thus, the aim of this study was to detect neutralizing antibodies against BoHV-1 in serum samples from 1,161 non-vaccinated cows from 59 dairy cattle herds in 23 municipalities of the Metropolitan, North, Northwest and South macro-regions. The identification of seropositive cows was evaluated by the virus neutralization test. The results showed that of all serum samples evaluated 775 (66.75%) had neutralizing antibodies against BoHV-1. Moreover, all herds were found positive; however, the percentage of positive cows varied among regions; 49.06%, 62.15%, 67.21% and 80.04% for the Metropolitan, South, North and Northwest macro-regions, respectively. In this study, the results clearly indicate the dissemination of the viral agent in dairy cattle in the ES state, requiring the monitoring and control of diseases related to BoHV-1 infection.

Survival analysis: a tool in the study of post-harvest diseases in peaches

Survival analysis is applied when the time until the occurrence of an event is of interest. Such data are routinely collected in plant diseases, although applications of the method are uncommon. The objective of this study was to use two studies on post-harvest diseases of peaches, considering two harvests together and the existence of random effect shared by fruits of a same tree, in order to describe the main techniques in survival analysis. The nonparametric Kaplan-Meier method, the log-rank test and the semi-parametric Cox's proportional hazards model were used to estimate the effect of cultivars and the number of days after full bloom on the survival to the brown rot symptom and the instantaneous risk of expressing it in two consecutive harvests. The joint analysis with baseline effect, varying between harvests, and the confirmation of the tree effect as a grouping factor with random effect were appropriate to interpret the phenomenon (disease) evaluated and can be important tools to replace or complement the conventional analysis, respecting the nature of the variable and the phenomenon.

How logrolling can explain the failure of the government coalition in Brazil

This article presents an analysis of the behavior of federal representatives in the Brazilian House of Representatives between 1995 and 1998, when a series of constitutional amendments were presented by the president to be voted on by Congress. The objective is to show that the lack of a stable government coalition resulted in costs to society that were not anticipated by the government. The study argues that a logroll - a trade of votes - was the strategy used by the government in order to guarantee the number of votes necessary to approve the amendments. This strategy created a vicious system in which representatives would only vote with the government if they had benefits in return.

Possible consequences of increasing life expectancy in Brazil: the perspective of a European historical demographer

Those over sixty years of age accounted for 6.6% of the total population of Brazil in 1985, in the Federal Republic of Germany this proportion was 20.3% in 1984. As early as 1950 it had been 14.5%. This proportion will not even be reached in Brazil in the year 2000 when persons aged sixty years and older are only projected to make up 8.8% of the total population. Similarly, in 1982/84 life expectancy at birth in the Federal Republic was 70.8 years for men and 77.5 for women; in Brazil the figures for 1980/85 were, by contrast, "only" 61.0 and 66.0. Against this background it is easy to understand why the discussion concerning an ageing society with its many related medical, economic, individual and social problems has been so slow in coming into its own in Brazil. As important as a more intensive consideration of these aspects may be in Brazil at present, they are, nevertheless, only one side of the story. For a European historical demographer with a long-term perspective of three of four hundred years, the other side of the story is just as important. The life expectancy which is almost ten years lower in Brazil is not a result of the fact that no one in Brazil lives to old age. In 1981 people sixty-five years and older accounted for 34.4% of all deaths! At the same time infants accounted for only 22.1% of total mortality. They are responsible, along with the "premature" deaths among youths and adults, for the low, "average" life expectancy figure. In Europe, by contrast, these "premature" deaths no longer play much of a role. In 1982/84 more than half of the women (52.8%) in the Federal Republic of Germany lived to see their eightieth birthdays and almost half of the men (47.3%) lived to see their seventy-fifth. Our biological existence is guaranteed to an extent today that would have been unthinkable a few generations ago. Then, the classic troika of "plague, hunger and war" threatened our forefathers all the time and everywhere. The radical transition from the formerly uncertain to a present-day certain lifetime, which is the result of the repression of "plague, hunger and war", led to unexpected consequences for our living together. Our forefathers were forced to live in closely knit Gemeinschaften in the interest of physical survival and to subordinate their egoistic goals to a common value, but now these pressures have, for the most part, fallen away. Correspondingly, this much more certain EGO has taken center stage. An ever greater number of us chooses to live life as single beings: the number of marriages is lower every year; the number of divorces is on the increase; in Berlin (West) more than half (sic! 52.3%) of all households are already composed on only one person. For the last dozen years the annual number of births in the Federal Republic has been insufficient to ensure population replacement. Not a population explosion but rather the opposite, a population implosion, is our problem. Human beings do not appear to be "social animals", as was axiomatically assumed for so long. They were only forced to behave as such for as long as "plague, hunger and war" forced them to do so. When these life endangering conditions no longer exist and life becomes certain even without their being integrated into a Gemeinschaft then humans suddenly show themselves more and more to be independent single beings. It is not the percentage of the population that is over sixty or sixty-five that is decisive in this context but rather how certain adults perceive their biological lives to be, since they are the ones who organize their lives, who build communities or who are ever more often willing only to enter into means-to-an-end personal unions without lasting or close ties and mutual responsibilities. There are many signs which seem to point to a development in this direction in Brazil as well. More and more adults in Brazil are caught up in the deep-seated transition from an uncertain to a certain lifetime. A third of them die after having reached their sixty-fifth birthday. It therefore seems to me to be high time that one began to give more consideration to the other side of the story in Brazil as well. And who is more suited intensively to consider the long-term perspectives than those engaged in the public health sector in whose competence, after all, such aspects, as "life certainty", "life expectancy" and "age at death" belong?

On the assessment of exposure to airborne ultrafine particles in urban environments

The aim of this study was to contribute to the assessment of exposure levels of ultrafine particles in the urban environment of Lisbon, Portugal, due to automobile traffic, by monitoring lung deposited alveolar surface area (resulting from exposure to ultrafine particles) in a major avenue leading to the town center during late spring, as well as in indoor buildings facing it. Data revealed differentiated patterns for week days and weekends, consistent with PM2.5 and PM10 patterns currently monitored by air quality stations in Lisbon. The observed ultrafine particulate levels may be directly correlated with fluxes in automobile traffic. During a typical week, amounts of ultrafine particles per alveolar deposited surface area varied between 35 and 89.2 μm2/cm3, which are comparable with levels reported for other towns in Germany and the United States. The measured values allowed for determination of the number of ultrafine particles per cubic centimeter, which are comparable to levels reported for Madrid and Brisbane. In what concerns outdoor/indoor levels, we observed higher levels (32 to 63%) outdoors, which is somewhat lower than levels observed in houses in Ontario.

The problems of the european union film industry: an evolution from "subsidy trap" to the advent of "virtual print fee" model

Dissertação de Mestrado, Gestão de Empresa (MBA), 16 de Julho de 2013, Universidade dos Açores.

On the development of an automatic voice pleasantness classification and intensity estimation system

In the last few years, the number of systems and devices that use voice based interaction has grown significantly. For a continued use of these systems, the interface must be reliable and pleasant in order to provide an optimal user experience. However there are currently very few studies that try to evaluate how pleasant is a voice from a perceptual point of view when the final application is a speech based interface. In this paper we present an objective definition for voice pleasantness based on the composition of a representative feature subset and a new automatic voice pleasantness classification and intensity estimation system. Our study is based on a database composed by European Portuguese female voices but the methodology can be extended to male voices or to other languages. In the objective performance evaluation the system achieved a 9.1% error rate for voice pleasantness classification and a 15.7% error rate for voice pleasantness intensity estimation.

An analysis of the impact of bus contention on the WCET in multicores

The use of multicores is becoming widespread inthe field of embedded systems, many of which have real-time requirements. Hence, ensuring that real-time applications meet their timing constraints is a pre-requisite before deploying them on these systems. This necessitates the consideration of the impact of the contention due to shared lowlevel hardware resources like the front-side bus (FSB) on the Worst-CaseExecution Time (WCET) of the tasks. Towards this aim, this paper proposes a method to determine an upper bound on the number of bus requests that tasks executing on a core can generate in a given time interval. We show that our method yields tighter upper bounds in comparison with the state of-the-art. We then apply our method to compute the extra contention delay incurred by tasks, when they are co-scheduled on different cores and access the shared main memory, using a shared bus, access to which is granted using a round-robin arbitration (RR) protocol.

Improving the reliability of WiDom in a single broadcast domain

WiDom is a previously proposed prioritized medium access control protocol for wireless channels. We present a modification to this protocol in order to improve its reliability. This modification has similarities with cooperative relaying schemes, but, in our protocol, all nodes can relay a carrier wave. The preliminary evaluation shows that, under transmission errors, a significant reduction on the number of failed tournaments can be achieved.

Body image in Brazil: recent advances in the state of knowledge and methodological issues

OBJECTIVE To analyze Brazilian literature on body image and the theoretical and methodological advances that have been made. METHODS A detailed review was undertaken of the Brazilian literature on body image, selecting published articles, dissertations and theses from the SciELO, SCOPUS, LILACS and PubMed databases and the CAPES thesis database. Google Scholar was also used. There was no start date for the search, which used the following search terms: “body image” AND “Brazil” AND “scale(s)”; “body image” AND “Brazil” AND “questionnaire(s)”; “body image” AND “Brazil” AND “instrument(s)”; “body image” limited to Brazil and “body image”. RESULTS The majority of measures available were intended to be used in college students, with half of them evaluating satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the body. Females and adolescents of both sexes were the most studied population. There has been a significant increase in the number of available instruments. Nevertheless, numerous published studies have used non-validated instruments, with much confusion in the use of the appropriate terms (e.g., perception, dissatisfaction, distortion). CONCLUSIONS Much more is needed to understand body image within the Brazilian population, especially in terms of evaluating different age groups and diversifying the components/dimensions assessed. However, interest in this theme is increasing, and important steps have been taken in a short space of time.

On the choice of posittioning and cluster size for fixed relay stations in a LTE network

The long term evolution (LTE) is one of the latest standards in the mobile communications market. To achieve its performance, LTE networks use several techniques, such as multi-carrier technique, multiple-input-multiple-output and cooperative communications. Inside cooperative communications, this paper focuses on the fixed relaying technique, presenting a way for determining the best position to deploy the relay station (RS), from a set of empirical good solutions, and also to quantify the associated performance gain using different cluster size configurations. The best RS position was obtained through realistic simulations, which set it as the middle of the cell's circumference arc. Additionally, it also confirmed that network's performance is improved when the number of RSs is increased. It was possible to conclude that, for each deployed RS, the percentage of area served by an RS increases about 10 %. Furthermore, the mean data rate in the cell has been increased by approximately 60 % through the use of RSs. Finally, a given scenario with a larger number of RSs, can experience the same performance as an equivalent scenario without RSs, but with higher reuse distance. This conduces to a compromise solution between RS installation and cluster size, in order to maximize capacity, as well as performance.

Analysis of the domain of applicability of an algorithm for a resources system selection problem for Distributed/Agile/Virtual Enterprises integration

The process of resources systems selection takes an important part in Distributed/Agile/Virtual Enterprises (D/A/V Es) integration. However, the resources systems selection is still a difficult matter to solve in a D/A/VE, as it is pointed out in this paper. Globally, we can say that the selection problem has been equated from different aspects, originating different kinds of models/algorithms to solve it. In order to assist the development of a web prototype tool (broker tool), intelligent and flexible, that integrates all the selection model activities and tools, and with the capacity to adequate to each D/A/V E project or instance (this is the major goal of our final project), we intend in this paper to show: a formulation of a kind of resources selection problem and the limitations of the algorithms proposed to solve it. We formulate a particular case of the problem as an integer programming, which is solved using simplex and branch and bound algorithms, and identify their performance limitations (in terms of processing time) based on simulation results. These limitations depend on the number of processing tasks and on the number of pre-selected resources per processing tasks, defining the domain of applicability of the algorithms for the problem studied. The limitations detected open the necessity of the application of other kind of algorithms (approximate solution algorithms) outside the domain of applicability founded for the algorithms simulated. However, for a broker tool it is very important the knowledge of algorithms limitations, in order to, based on problem features, develop and select the most suitable algorithm that guarantees a good performance.

Contextual and individual indicators associated with the presence of teeth in adults

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to analyze whether socioeconomic conditions and the period of availability of fluoridated water are associated with the number of teeth present.METHODSThis cross-sectional study analyzed data from 1,720 adults between 20 and 59 years of age who resided in Florianópolis, SC, Southern Brazil, in 2009. The outcome investigated was the self-reported number of teeth present. The individual independent variables included gender, age range, skin color, number of years of schooling, and per capita household income. The duration of residence was used as a control variable. The contextual exposures included the period of availability of fluoridated water to the households and the socioeconomic variable for the census tracts, which was created from factor analysis of the tract’s mean income, education level, and percentage of households with treated water. Multilevel logistic regression was performed and inter-level interactions were tested.RESULTS Residents in intermediate and poorer areas and those with fluoridated water available for less time exhibited the presence of fewer teeth compared with those in better socioeconomic conditions and who had fluoridated water available for a longer period (OR = 1.02; 95%CI 1.01;1.02). There was an association between the period of availability of fluoridated water, per capita household income and number of years of education. The proportion of individuals in the poorer and less-educated stratum, which had fewer teeth present, was higher in regions where fluoridated water had been available for less time.CONCLUSIONS Poor socioeconomic conditions and a shorter period of availability of fluoridated water were associated with the probability of having fewer teeth in adulthood. Public policies aimed at reducing socioeconomic inequalities and increasing access to health services such as fluoridation of the water supply may help to reduce tooth loss in the future.